A Brief History of Electoral College Reform Efforts

Updated September 29, 2026

More than 700 proposals to change or abolish the Electoral College have been introduced in Congress, according to the National Archives, more than on any other constitutional subject. Only one has changed how the system works: the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, which gave electors separate votes for president and vice president. (The 23rd Amendment, in 1961, gave the District of Columbia three electors but left the mechanics alone.)

The history of those efforts shows how hard it is to change a constitutional institution, and why reformers have increasingly turned to the states.

Early proposals

Reform ideas started almost as soon as the system did, and they tended to mirror the anxieties of their era.

District voting. In the early 1800s, Congress repeatedly debated requiring every state to choose electors by district, with the statewide winner taking two at-large electors. That’s essentially the system Maine and Nebraska use today. The idea won Senate approval more than once but never cleared the House.
A president chosen by lot. In 1808, Sen. James Hillhouse of Connecticut proposed one-year presidential terms, with the president drawn by lot from among senators finishing their terms.
Sectional rotation. In December 1860, as Southern states moved toward secession, Sen. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee proposed alternating the presidency between the North and the South.

The high-water mark: 1948 to 1979

Close elections in 1948, 1960 and 1968, together with the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” rulings in the 1960s, pushed Electoral College reform to the top of Congress’s agenda.

Lodge-Gossett (1950). An amendment to divide every state’s electoral votes in proportion to its popular vote passed the Senate in 1950 but was defeated in the House.
Bayh-Celler (1969-70). George Wallace carried five Southern states in 1968, raising fears that no candidate would win a majority. Afterward, Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana and Rep. Emanuel Celler of New York pushed an amendment to abolish the Electoral College and elect the president by national popular vote, with a runoff if no ticket reached 40%. The American Bar Association had endorsed direct election in 1967. The House passed the amendment 339 to 70 in September 1969, and President Richard Nixon endorsed it. In the Senate, a filibuster led by Southern and small-state senators held; two cloture votes in September 1970 fell well short of the two-thirds then required.
The 1979 vote. President Jimmy Carter endorsed direct election in 1977. When the Senate voted on a direct-election amendment on July 10, 1979, it drew 51 votes to 48, a majority but 15 short of two-thirds. It remains the last time either chamber has voted on abolishing the Electoral College.

The shift to the states

After 1979, reformers largely gave up on amending the Constitution, which requires two-thirds of Congress and 38 states, and turned to state law. The Constitution lets each legislature decide how to appoint its electors, so a state can change its system on its own.

Colorado, 2004. Amendment 36 would have split Colorado’s electoral votes in proportion to the statewide vote, starting with that year’s election. Voters rejected it, about 65% to 35%.
Partisan redistribution plans. In the early 2010s, legislators in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia floated awarding electors by congressional district or similar formulas. Each plan stalled, partly because critics saw them as attempts to tilt the next election.
Nebraska. Republicans have repeatedly tried to return Nebraska to winner-take-all, most visibly in 2024 and again in 2025, when a bill backed by Gov. Jim Pillen was blocked by a filibuster. A 2026 petition drive to put the question on the ballot was abandoned.

The National Popular Vote compact

The most ambitious state-level effort is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, launched in 2006. Member states agree to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, but only once states with a majority of electoral votes (270) have joined. Maryland joined first, in 2007. Virginia is the latest, in April 2026, bringing the total to 18 states and D.C. with 222 electoral votes, 48 short of the threshold.

The courts

Reformers have also tried litigation. In 2018, Equal Citizens, a group founded by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, sued California, Texas, Massachusetts and South Carolina. The suits argued that winner-take-all allocation unconstitutionally shuts out voters who back the losing candidate in their state. The suits were dismissed, and in 2021 the Supreme Court declined to hear them.

The same group represented faithless electors from 2016 who argued they were free to vote their conscience. In Chiafalo v. Washington (2020), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states can require electors to honor their pledges.

Congress revisits the count

The most significant federal change in decades came after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 left the Electoral College itself alone but rewrote the rules for counting its votes. It made clear that the vice president’s role in the joint session is solely ministerial. It raised the threshold for objecting to a state’s electoral votes from one member of each chamber to one-fifth of each. And it named each state’s governor as the official who certifies its electors unless state law says otherwise.